State Of Autonomy: February Recap

3 min readMar 1, 2018

Motion sickness value: it’s the new Poop emoji.

Every month, I recap the news articles I’ve consumed around autonomous vehicles, calling out the highlights and keeping track of market projections. This is also your chance, dear readers, to nominate a topic for discussion in the following month. If you’re interested in a broader and darker conversation around human obsolescence, try subscribing to my newsletter, The Whimper.

How much meat is on the rideshare bone? We may find out soon enough, as February saw rapid-fire announcements from car manufacturers and AV startups launching home-cooked rideshare trials of varying maturity:

At the top of the list is Waymo’s Arizona robotaxi sans safety driver, the news of which was released a while back, but just this month received its TNC operator license to move forward. Then you’ve got Ford gearing up for a driverless delivery/fleet service in Miami. Nissan and DeNa are in on the game too, partnering for a pint-sized ridehailing trial in Japan. And finally, Pony.ai — the one-year-old startup who woke up a few months ago to find $100MM under their pillows — is going to conduct a very basic public test in China. None of these companies are leaning on Uber, DiDi, or Lyft (unless Waymo omitted mention of it) for the ridehail consumer experience.